Outlook.com customers can now import their email from Yahoo Mail

After receiving a great response from the customers who imported their email from Gmail to Outlook.com, we’re excited to announce that, as of today, you can use Outlook.com to import and manage your email from Yahoo Mail and many other IMAP-enabled email providers.

A recent study* by Radius Global revealed that 81% of all email users are using multiple email services. Keeping up with numerous accounts can be time-consuming, but moving to a single email service is not as easy as it sounds. It’s often hard to give up your older email account, because that’s the one your friends and family know, and it’s the one you use to sign in to so many different services.

To help you, the import wizard in Outlook.com allows you to import and manage your mail from Yahoo Mail or many other IMAP-enabled email providers, or from Gmail. You can keep your old email addresses, but manage them all from one place: Outlook.com.

Importing your email from Yahoo Mail

Importing your Yahoo Mail into Outlook.com is simple. To get started, navigate to Options and then click Import email accounts. Select Yahoo, enter your Yahoo email address and password, and then click Import. This will also set up your Yahoo email address as a “send from” account, meaning you can continue to send emails from your Yahoo address, right from Outlook.com. It’s also possible to connect your Yahoo account to your Microsoft account, so your Yahoo contacts appear in Outlook.com.

Importing your email from other email providers

We’ve also added the ability to import from many other popular IMAP-enabled email providers. To get started, navigate to Options, click Import email accounts, then select Other email provider. Most popular IMAP-enabled email providers are supported.

In both cases, the import happens in the background, so you can continue using Outlook.com or even sign out while it’s happening. Once the import is complete, we’ll send you an email to let you know. Import time will vary depending on how many emails there are to import.

Importing your mail will not affect your old account–you can keep using it as you always have. However, we’re confident that once you try Outlook.com, you’ll love it.

If you haven’t already, we encourage you to try the tool and let us know what you think.

I imported my yahoo account and set yahoo up to forward to outlook (there is an option to forward and keep the email in yahoo, or to just forward it). Outlook has my yahoo email as an alias and it all works like a champ.

I really thought there would be delays in getting my yahoo email from outlook but if I send a test message to yahoo, it shows immediately in outlook.

I’ve been sending and receiving yahoo email from outlook for 5 days now and nobody can tell I’ve switched providers. It reminds me of when you were finally able to move you cell phone number to another provider.

I’m super excited to use the awesome outlook interface as my primary email, and I’m amazed at how well Microsoft implemented the process.

Hi hekkktor. Since this is a one-time import, any emails that were imported before you hit cancel will still be in your inbox. You can delete them, but if you do the one-time import again, those emails will be imported again.

I imported my Yahoo email to my Outlook.com account, than I imported my email from my PC (Outlook 2010 app), so I had all my emails twice. I went ahead and removed my yahoo account, however all emails still remained in the account. I moved everything to the Deleted folder. How can I delete it? Meanwhile all my 13,000 plus emails with over 30 folders are sitting in my Deleted folder.